Posts Tagged ‘Critique’
My Aunt Edna thinks I’m Handsome.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My Aunt Edna throws ‘Handsome’ around like a farmer feeding grain to his chickens. To her, every male ever born into our family is on par with Brad Pitt or John Kennedy. Even my 6 toed, web footed second cousin gets ‘Handsome’ and he’s got eyes so crossed he looks like Mad Eye Mooney from Harry Potter. Her standards are obviously not quite as stringent as most when it comes to defining handsome. As a future professional photographer I need to keep in mind that not every shot is going to have an Aunt Edna to love it unconditionally.
I’d imagine that most of the photos that I’ll take will be poor. A few may be downright awful and if I’m lucky 3% will be OK and if I’m really really lucky 1% will be good. Not Aunt Edna good but Joe Consumer good. Good enough to hand over copious amounts of cash so that I hit my $10,000 target. This in no way, shape or form means that only the good ones will result in financial rewards. I’ve seen plenty of bad art sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I personally bought the ugliest limited edition Andy Warhol print you could imagine of Wayne Gretzky for $3,000.00 and it is in no way any better looking now that it has quadrupled in value.
I find Quentin Tarantino’s non-linear storytelling awkward and annoying but millions of his fans think he is God’s gift to the cinematic profession. The only exception for me being Inglourious Basterds which I found very entertaining and one of the best films of the year. Ultimately, one man’s treasure is another man’s trash and while there are hundreds if not thousands of technical rules that can and perhaps do define what makes a “Good Picture” I’ll keep my definition as simple as one that people like – even if it is just people like Aunt Edna.
Don’t let anyone tell you your pictures aren’t good. You only need one person to say they are to prove the critics wrong.